Some conventional answering machines have provided a feature for distinguishing old messages from new messages. In particular, a user can save messages after listening to them during a playback session, and still determine whether additional messages have been recorded after the playback session. That is, the messages stored at some time after the playback session will be designated as "new". Therefore, a user can select to playback only new messages sequentially stored after the previous playback session. However, the designation of messages as being "new" is presently limited to messages received at a time after a playback session has been initiated.
Further, answering machines have generally provided queuing functions for selectively listening to designated messages. While such queuing is practically limited in analog (audio tape based) systems (i.e., the analog machine must "listen" to each message in order to find a designated message in a sequence), the queuing function provides access to a message at any position in the sequence of messages stored in an answering machine. However, no answering machine presently provides a way of stopping playback after listening to fewer than all messages and leaving messages which have not been replayed during the playback session designated as "new". Further, no answering machine presently allows a user to replay a selected portion of a message and still designate that message as "new" depending on the amount of the message replayed. Conventional answering machines will typically designate a message as old even if the message has not been replayed or only a short portion has been replayed.
Accordingly, there is a need to designate messages as being "new" at any position in a sequence of messages. That is, there is a need to provide a designation for a message based upon the period of time elapsed during the playback of a particular message, rather than the time at which the message was recorded, to more accurately reflect whether a message is "new".